The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [99]
“Thirty-four fourteen North Ravenswood,” he said, indicating the twin directly across the way.
“What about it.”
“June tenth, 1980, Ted Kaczynski mailed a bomb to United Airlines.”
“The Unabomber,” Nada said.
“On the package—on the return to address—he wrote Thirty-four fourteen North Ravenswood, Chicago, Illinois six oh six five seven.”
“Kaczynski used to live across the street?”
Patrick shook his head. “He grew up South Side. So all the time I want to know, Why Thirty-four fourteen North Ravenswood? Did that number just pop into his head? Was it random? Was it meaningful? I sit here and look at Thirty-four fourteen North Ravenswood and I wait for something to happen. As long as it doesn’t, I paint.” He cackled, like a child. “His brother turned him in. The Unabomber. How terrible to find your brother kills.”
“Or your father.” Nada put some sting in her voice in case he was taunting her.
Patrick put his head against the glass. “Fathers are never who they seem to be. A mother with a secret is the scariest thing of all.”
“My mother can keep all the secrets she wants, as far as I’m concerned,” Nada said. She wasn’t yet used to the rhythm of the conversation—which information was relevant, which wasn’t.
“I wasn’t always Coca-Cola,” he said turning around, his head bobbing.
“Always what?”
He laughed again and his eyes, or one of them anyway, drifted south and he stared at Nada’s chest until she became uncomfortable and bothered, and then he pointed a finger and advanced it toward her. She was scared, but she didn’t move. The tip of his finger met her collarbone and he pressed it there, hard and hurtful.
And suddenly she knew.
“The spider,” she whispered. “You have a spider. Like mine.”
He removed his finger and touched his own collarbone and then spread his long fingers, like wires that crept up his neck and across his face and gathered up his hair and then clutched the top of his skull.
“I used to,” he said.
“It made some people crazy,” she said, unafraid of offending him. “There was a recall. They took yours out.”
He backed away, stopping over the tile he had just painted. “Can you still see it?”
“See what?”
He shook his hands at the tile and then raised them above his head. He had a big yellow-toothed grin that seemed unconnected to their conversation. “It! Everything!”
“I don’t know what you mean.” She added, “I’m sorry.”
He studied her, still grinning, and then bent over the tile again, like he was about to shit on it. Like a bear shitting in the woods, she thought.
He lifted the tile from the newspaper and brought it to her on his fingertips. “I miss it,” he said. Then he reached deep into a torn pocket of his parka and produced a heavy, unruly set of keys, four or five full key chains all linked together. “You drive.”
Nada’s car was still in a lot by the bar, or it would be if the predatory trucks of North Side Towing, a virtual private police force once much despised by her father, hadn’t yet circled it. She followed him down through the empty house to the band’s van in the leaning garage and tried to follow the directions he mumbled to her, which was difficult because, eyes on the road, sitting next to him on the bench seat, she couldn’t get a straight look at his lips. She adjusted the rearview so she could see his face and tried to compensate for the reverse image of his mouth flap.
The mercy? Diversity? Diversey.
Right on Diversey and then a long, silent drive, the tile balanced on his knee, thirty blocks or more until he stopped her with a grunt and pointed to a large warehouse parking lot. She stopped at the locked gate and Patrick leaned over her lap to undo a key dangling from the ignition. He smelled like tar and he labored to breathe, producing a wheezing sound that caused her to imagine his parka as being like a portable iron lung.
The padlock undone, they drove to the building, to a door Patrick singled out with a series of waves. On the brick Nada saw the ghosted outlines of a long-ago sign reading MARSHALL HELD. Some of Nada’s good memories